Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology offers a stark choice for humanity | The Week
> Capital and Ideology is a work of political economy in the broadest sense — a staggeringly ambitious effort attempting to synthesize centuries of history, economics, and politics into one grand picture.
#Money#Economics#EconomicHistory#Capitalism: "The world of bumbling cavemen trying to exchange mammoth tusks for necklaces is a crude stone-age replica of a modern capitalist economy built in the mind of an economist. They simply take their their own situation - dependence on large-scale networks of people who trade specialized goods with strangers - and set it in world where it didn’t exist.
These presentist histories of money are also closely associated with functional descriptions of money. Functional descriptions are dodgy for a number of reasons (see How the 'Functions of Money' blind us to the Structure of Money), but one of those reasons is that they bolster the idea that money was created to solve some pre-existing problem. It treats money as if it were a tool we’ve ‘decided’ to use.
The classic ‘functions of money’ are - reputedly - medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. These are badly-worded descriptions that conceal more than than reveal, but, regardless of their accuracy, there’s just something icky about laying out a list of reasons for why we use money, because - let’s face it - nobody ‘chooses’ to use money. We use it out of an animal instinct, because everyone knows, and feels in their body, that if they don’t use it they’ll be totally and utterly fucked. Trying to describe this inescapable infrastructure with reference to rational choice is just weird. We are created by money. Of course we’re going to use it. It’s the catalyst for what we have become." https://www.asomo.co/p/money-as-addiction
📖 Ricardo Noronha published a paper on the political economy of the Portuguese Revolution, where he analyses “the plans and strategies devised to ensure a socialist transition in the semiperiphery of the capitalist world-system during the 1970s.”
🗣 The call for papers for the international congress "Commoning: Common Resources, Associationism and Networks of Reciprocity throughout History" is ongoing.
The meeting will take place via Zoom on 14 and 15 March 2024.
For anyone interested in #economics, at one time or another you will have come across #economichistory written by Nick Crafts who has passed aged 74 last week.
For those interested in the debates about the #industrialrevolution his work was indispensable.
Sadly, in the last decades economics seems to have been marginalising work like Crafts, with the exception of some cliometrics, and is the worse for this absence of #history from its central concerns.
Episode 2 of A History of Capitalism is now live! In this week's episode, we talk about pre-modern trade. Trade across three continents was not an easy task. In this episode we meet the merchants and markets who made goods move through the eyes of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.